At present technologies are standardized for opening up telecommunications networks towards Application Service Providers (ASPs) that offer applications to end-users. The driving force behind this is the expectation that a larger offering of applications to the end-users results in a higher traffic load which, in the end, will spur the telecommunication vendor sales.
The ASP can offer services to end-users that are based on or make use of the capabilities and/or resources of the telecommunications network. The ASP can be regarded a Service Requestor (SR): it requests a services derived from or based on capabilities and/or resources in the telecommunications network that are offered by a Network Operator (NO) or Service Provider (SP). Examples of such services are location-based services, presence, messaging, multiparty call control, etc.
In order for an ASP to survive in a market wherein similar services are provided by many other competitors and wherein many service providers offer telecommunications services against continuously differing prices, the ASP requires the flexibility to easily switch from one service provider to another, even on a daily basis if so desired. Although from a technical point of view, switching the taking of services from one service provider to another can be effected by virtually a click of a button, this is not desired without certifying to the new service provider that the service requester to be connected is financially liable to live up to the costs of the service.
This problem is nowadays easily tackled by submitting a liability statement issued by a financial institution, such as a bank or the like. The service requester contacts his bank and requests the bank to issue such a liability statement. The bank, in turn, investigates the financial whereabouts of the service requester and may issue a statement regarding e.g. payment history of the service requester or an amount up to which the service requester is supposed to be liable. The service requester, upon receiving the statement e.g. by mail or facsimile, may provide the statement to the service provider which in turn enables the service requester to use the telecommunications services of the provider. There is a large number of disadvantages with the procedure described above, as will be explained hereinbelow.
A first disadvantage of the above-described procedure is that the liability statement issued by the financial institution only provides information with respect to the liability of the service requester at the moment of time on which the liability statement is issued. The service provider may enable the service requester to use the requested services, however within short time after the provisioning of services has commenced, a change in the liability status of the service requester may make the issued liability statement obsolete and services are provided by the service provider to the service requester without the service requester being liable to pay for these services.
Another problem of the above-mentioned procedure is that it is time consuming, and involves the combined efforts of the financial institution, the service requester and the service provider before the service provisioning can be enabled. Since a rather large number of people are involved in establishing the service as a result of the above-mentioned procedure, the application service provider or service requester is not very flexible to switch from one service provider to another on a daily basis. On the other hand the issuing of liability statements is relatively expensive, while all the service provider needs to know is whether or not the service requester is liable (and continues to be liable) to pay for the requested services.
As a result, the service requester will not be able to provide the service until the liability statement of the financial institution is issued, transmitted and accepted by the service provider. This leads to all kinds of technical problems, e.g. where services are dependent on other services or where customers of the service requester rely on the continuous provisioning of a service by the service requester.